Paperclip

What is Paperclip?

Paperclip is an open source orchestration platform for running teams of AI agents. It’s a Node.js server and React dashboard that “hires” agents from any provider — Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, or anything that can receive a heartbeat — into an org chart, assigns them goals, and tracks their work, costs, and decisions from one place. If a single agent is an employee, Paperclip is the company around it.

What is Paperclip best for?

Paperclip is best for builders and operators coordinating many agents at once — the person with 20 Claude Code terminals open who has lost track of what each one is doing. It suits running autonomous “AI companies” 24/7 while keeping human oversight, budgets, and an audit trail. It is a coordination layer, not an agent itself.

What can Paperclip do?

• Org chart for agents — hire agents from any provider with roles, titles, reporting lines, and scoped permissions and secrets.
• Goal alignment — every task traces back to a company mission, so work has context instead of drifting.
• Ticket-based task management — declare intent, let agents work, and verify output from diffs, screenshots, and tests with review gates and approvals.
• Cost control — per-agent monthly budgets with hard stops when an agent hits 100% utilization.
• Heartbeat execution — agents wake on schedules, task assignments, or @-mentions rather than burning tokens continuously.
• Governance and audit — immutable activity logs record every instruction, response, and tool call with full attribution.
• Skill Studio — build, share, and evaluate reusable agent skills across the org.
• Multi-company isolation — one deployment runs unlimited companies with complete data separation.

Where does Paperclip fall short?

Paperclip brings no intelligence of its own — it’s a control plane, so the quality of the work depends entirely on the agents you plug in, and you pay each agent’s model and API costs on top of running Paperclip.

It’s also overkill for one or two agents. The org-chart, budget, and governance machinery only pays off when you’re juggling many agents toward shared goals; for a single assistant it’s more structure than you need.

Finally, it’s young and fast-moving. Paperclip Labs shipped it in 2026, there is no managed cloud (you self-host it yourself), and features like bring-your-own ticket system are still on the roadmap, so expect rapid change.

Is Paperclip free?

Yes — Paperclip is fully free and open source under the MIT license, with no Paperclip account required and no paid tier gating features. You self-host it, so the only real costs are the infrastructure you run it on and the model/API usage of the agents it coordinates.

What does Paperclip replace?

Paperclip is a self-hosted stand-in for paid, hosted agent platforms. Instead of renting an autonomous worker like Devin or building agents inside closed SaaS such as Lindy or Salesforce Agentforce, you run and coordinate your own agents — across any model or provider — while keeping the data, budgets, and governance on your own infrastructure.

FAQ

Is Paperclip open source? Yes. Paperclip is released under the MIT license by Paperclip Labs, with the full Node.js server and React UI available on GitHub.

Can I self-host Paperclip for free? Yes. Self-hosting is the default and only distribution — there’s no paid cloud. An installer script or npx paperclipai onboard sets it up locally with an embedded PostgreSQL database.

Is Paperclip a good Agentforce or Devin alternative? It’s a strong fit if you want to own the stack. Rather than a hosted autonomous worker or a proprietary agent cloud, Paperclip lets you coordinate agents from any provider with your own budgets, governance, and audit trails — but it relies on the agents you bring for the actual work.

What do I need to run Paperclip? Node.js 24.11+ and pnpm 9.15+. Locally it runs as a single Node process with an embedded Postgres; for production you point it at your own PostgreSQL and deploy however you like. You also supply API keys for the agents it orchestrates.